(iii) Begas.This name is derived from medieval Arab historians and has been identified with the Bugatæ and Buka of earlier days. It is applied to the tribes living in the eastern desert who speak various languages belonging to the so-called Hamitic group of languages. The principal tribes are Ababda, Bisharin, Amarar, Hadendoa, Halenga, Beni Amer, Habab.
In type they are far more “Caucasian” than those we have previously mentioned, and they occupy the same position and present the same characteristics as many turbulent pastoral tribes mentioned by Egyptian scribes and classical writers.[242] As Hamites, one school of anthropologists represented by the Italian Sergi, regards them as an off-shoot of the great Euro-African stock which populated North Africa and Europe: others bring them from Asia. “Non nostri est tantas componere lites.” Nor do we like to hazard an opinion as to whether they or the Nubians were the creators of ancient Meroe. The termination ab which is so common throughout the Berber Province proves that people of the Bega stock once held this district, and their immediate descendants are probably to be looked for among the riverain “Arabs” rather than the desert Begas, for no civilized people would exchange a settled life for a nomad life, least of all so warlike a race as the Begas.
According to W. Max Müller (“Aethiopien,” Berlin, 1904, p. 19), we have in the legend quoted on [p. 224,] a distorted version of one Hamitic settlement in this very area. The word Sembridae or Semberritae is a hybrid name formed by a North Hamitic people out of a Semitic root, and means, not “Deserters,” but “Nomads,” “Wanderers.” The legend above-mentioned will therefore be the echo of an early Hamitic invasion of a district then peopled by Nubas or Negroes, and of the adoption of a sedentary life by these invading “Wanderers,” whose success may explain the shifting of the capital from Napata to Meroe ([p. 225]).
(iv) Arabs.The first three stocks have been in the country for as long as our records go. The Arabs are comparative newcomers; it is improbable that they came in any numbers until after the fall of the Christian kingdoms of Dongola and Alwa (Soba). The traditions of some tribes are against this, but historians only mention raids, and the traditions are not to be set against the historians’ testimony. The extension of these raids, which led to the downfall of Christianity and a consequent increase of Arab immigration, was probably due to pressure caused on tribes elsewhere by the conquests of Spain and Portugal on the one side and Turkey on the other. This would give the Arabs an occupation of from four to six centuries, though a slow infiltration from Arabia into the Sudan must have gone on from the beginning.
Now, at any rate, the Arab dominates the northern half of the Sudan, that is, from Egypt to Kordofan. He has nowhere exterminated the original inhabitants; he has in many cases not yet succeeded in forcing even his language upon them; he has, unlike the Arabs in Arabia, intermarried freely with them; but his conquest has been so far complete that his religious ideals and tribal organisation have replaced the older faith and institutions wherever he has cared to carry them. This fact upsets our perspective. The people call themselves Arabs and we accept the name, but it would certainly be a mistake to regard them as Arabians or to recognise as genuine their long pedigrees “of unsullied (?) Arab descent” “going back to early Mohammedan times” (Keane). The present writer believes that the materials newly published by Naum Bey Shoucair (“History of the Sudan,” Cairo, 1904—in Arabic), enable him to trace two distinct steps in the Arabization of the Central Sudan.
Up to 1500 A.D., the Christians reigned on the Blue Nile; there are no Gubbas, no mention of Fikis, earlier than this, as would certainly have been the case if many Arabs had been here. About this time the Fungs, a powerful black tribe under Amara Dunkas, became Muslims and, assisted by some Arab immigrants, overthrew the kingdom of Soba. Hardly had they done so when they were themselves menaced by Sultan Selim, the Turkish conquerer of Egypt and Suakin; it was their policy then to represent themselves as orthodox Muslims connected with the most venerated Arab tribes, and a certain Sheikh El Samarakandi, who had wandered to the court of Dunkas, provided the necessary pedigrees, which were duly sent to Selim and by him much admired (Naum II, pp. 73, 74). But the Sheikh did his work clumsily, if it may be judged from a Jaali pedigree which purports to be extracted from his work, for he left at the crucial point several non-Arabic names, and few, if any, Sudanese pedigrees are accepted by Muslim genealogists elsewhere.
At this point the Arabization of Central Sudan seems to have stood almost still for three centuries. Gubbas were built and Fikis became powerful, but the tribal organization, although indigenous among the Begas, did not supplant the very different political division of the land into small kingdoms tributary to Sennar. The emblems of kingly power, a throne called the K-K-R and a two-horned cap (Naum II, pp. 100, 101), are also clearly African, not Arab. Burkhardt, again, who knew the Arabs in Syria and Arabia, is never tired of contrasting their manners and morals with those of the Sudanese Arabs.
This period was closed by the Egyptian conquest of Mohammed Ali, which continued the process begun in the time of Selim, and finally obliterated several of the most characteristic survivals from pre-Islamic days. Indeed, all the events of the last century, including the great upheaval in which it culminated, had the same tendency. Having lost their native kingdoms, the people have been forced to adopt the Arab tribal system, and, unlike the Berbers in Algiers, have identified themselves enthusiastically with all things Arab. The more striking is it that they should have still kept such African customs as the Akh-el-banat, the scarring of the cheeks, female excision,[244] all alien from the true Arab of Arabia.
If this reading of history be accepted, the people of the Central Sudan will be described as a mixed race recently forced into an Arab mould and in varying degrees modified by Arab blood. And we may prophesy that future researches will prove the other elements in this race to be akin to the other races on its borders, to the Nubians and Begas on the north, to the Negroes, Gallas, Abyssinians, etc., on the south and south-east.
In the above sketch there are so many necessary gaps, and so many controverted points of necessity passed over in silence, that it seems fair to the reader to give a brief statement of a different theory recently put forward by Sir H. H. Johnston on this subject. We therefore append a résumé of his views compiled by Captain Morant from “The Nile Quest”:—